Among Others
Feb. 25th, 2011 11:54![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starladyHappy birthday, inkstone!
Walton, Jo. Among Others. New York: Tor Books, 2011.
I've quite enjoyed Jo Walton's other books that I've read, but this one is in many respects on a whole different level. I think just about anyone reading this journal would like it; it's about, well, a lot of things, life and death and growing up and being too old for your age and reading and being strange and most of all about reading SFF.
It's set in 1979 and 1980; Mori Phelps, after the death of her sister, has run away from home and been reunited with her father, who abandoned the family when she and her sister, also Mor, were quite small. Her father's English sisters pack Mor off to their alma mater Arlinghurst, where Mor, who has a disability which makes it impossible to play sports, spends most of her time in the library writing the journal that forms the book in mirror-hand and reading all the SFF books she can get her hands on, with a sprinkling of classics mixed in.
It sounds kind of overdetermined, that she has a dead twin sister and a disability and is the only girl like her at her boarding school, but it's all handled very--not realistically, I dislike the concept of "realism" in some ways, but matter-of-factly. Mor is in pain most of the time and has limited mobility; she deals with it. Her mother is an evil witch; she deals with it. Her twin sister's dead; she deals with it as best she can. She's not like any of the people around her; she deals with it until she can't, at which point she falls into sff fandom in the form of a local book club.
Just for the reading and the feeling like a complete weirdo for liking books and being smart, I sympathized utterly with Mor; she reminded me (painfully at times) of myself, though I spent most of high school trying to force myself through the so-called canon and I really wish I'd been more like Mor and read more SFF. I haven't read any of the LeGuin books Mor loves recently enough to quite get the full nuances of what she talks about all the time, and I've never read Zelazny and you couldn't pay me to read Heinlein, whom Mor loves, but she loves Delany too, though unlike her I think Philip K. Dick has at least one redeeming book. At some point I just started keeping a list of book recs, as well as folding down pages with particularly brilliant bits, like this one:
Mor can do magic, and she sees and speaks to fairies, and one of the things I really liked about this book is just how much Walton does manage to frustrate so many of fantasy's narrative tropes, to the point that the people around Mor who've read the same books can't quite grasp that magic isn't like it is in the stories and neither are fairies. Mor's right that the entire story is about what happens after, and in its own way, putting one foot in front of the other, which sometimes is the hardest thing to do of all, it's just as interesting as the grand struggle. There's a lot of LeGuin in here, both in that and particularly in the ending; I really liked it. I sympathized with Mor even more for her grief over her sister, and also for the painful realization she comes to, that you can't always count on your family even if they love you, that sometimes you have to shift for yourself. And she does--very well, even, in the end. I know this is a book I'l be coming back to, because Mor sees the world almost entirely the same way I do, and in the end she affirms what she already knew, what I firmly also believe, that life is for the living of it. And for reading SFF.
inkstone!Walton, Jo. Among Others. New York: Tor Books, 2011.
I've quite enjoyed Jo Walton's other books that I've read, but this one is in many respects on a whole different level. I think just about anyone reading this journal would like it; it's about, well, a lot of things, life and death and growing up and being too old for your age and reading and being strange and most of all about reading SFF.
It's set in 1979 and 1980; Mori Phelps, after the death of her sister, has run away from home and been reunited with her father, who abandoned the family when she and her sister, also Mor, were quite small. Her father's English sisters pack Mor off to their alma mater Arlinghurst, where Mor, who has a disability which makes it impossible to play sports, spends most of her time in the library writing the journal that forms the book in mirror-hand and reading all the SFF books she can get her hands on, with a sprinkling of classics mixed in.
It sounds kind of overdetermined, that she has a dead twin sister and a disability and is the only girl like her at her boarding school, but it's all handled very--not realistically, I dislike the concept of "realism" in some ways, but matter-of-factly. Mor is in pain most of the time and has limited mobility; she deals with it. Her mother is an evil witch; she deals with it. Her twin sister's dead; she deals with it as best she can. She's not like any of the people around her; she deals with it until she can't, at which point she falls into sff fandom in the form of a local book club.
Just for the reading and the feeling like a complete weirdo for liking books and being smart, I sympathized utterly with Mor; she reminded me (painfully at times) of myself, though I spent most of high school trying to force myself through the so-called canon and I really wish I'd been more like Mor and read more SFF. I haven't read any of the LeGuin books Mor loves recently enough to quite get the full nuances of what she talks about all the time, and I've never read Zelazny and you couldn't pay me to read Heinlein, whom Mor loves, but she loves Delany too, though unlike her I think Philip K. Dick has at least one redeeming book. At some point I just started keeping a list of book recs, as well as folding down pages with particularly brilliant bits, like this one:
I didn't ask to have my good leg replaced by a creaky rusty weathervane, but then I suppose nobody does. I would have made much greater sacrifices. I was prepared to die, and Mor did die. I should think of it as a war-wound, an old soldier's scars. Frodo lost a finger, and all his own possibility of happiness. Tolkien understood about the things that happen after the end. Because this is after the end, this is all the Scourging of the Shire, this is figuring out how to live in the time that wasn't supposed to happen after the glorious last stand. I saved the world, or I think I did, and look, the world is still here, with sunsets and interlibrary loans. And it doesn't care about me any more than the Shire cared about Frodo. But that doesn't matter. My mother isn't a dark queen who everyone loves and despairs. She's alive, all right, but she's trapped in the nets of her own malice like a spider caught in its own web. I got away from her. And she can't ever hurt Mor now. (60)
Mor can do magic, and she sees and speaks to fairies, and one of the things I really liked about this book is just how much Walton does manage to frustrate so many of fantasy's narrative tropes, to the point that the people around Mor who've read the same books can't quite grasp that magic isn't like it is in the stories and neither are fairies. Mor's right that the entire story is about what happens after, and in its own way, putting one foot in front of the other, which sometimes is the hardest thing to do of all, it's just as interesting as the grand struggle. There's a lot of LeGuin in here, both in that and particularly in the ending; I really liked it. I sympathized with Mor even more for her grief over her sister, and also for the painful realization she comes to, that you can't always count on your family even if they love you, that sometimes you have to shift for yourself. And she does--very well, even, in the end. I know this is a book I'l be coming back to, because Mor sees the world almost entirely the same way I do, and in the end she affirms what she already knew, what I firmly also believe, that life is for the living of it. And for reading SFF.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-25 20:26 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-26 00:46 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-26 13:43 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-28 04:29 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-28 06:58 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-28 07:54 (UTC)